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Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40

24 Mar 13 - 09:52 PM (#3494429)
Subject: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: pdq

The official release date was March 24, 1973.

Feel a bit old, eh bunky?


24 Mar 13 - 09:55 PM (#3494432)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: Rapparee

I don't trust anything over 30.


24 Mar 13 - 10:29 PM (#3494446)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: pdq

I don't trust anyone past the 40th parallel.


24 Mar 13 - 11:22 PM (#3494459)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: katlaughing

got to see, interview, and write a piece about them. love it still.


25 Mar 13 - 03:48 AM (#3494491)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: GUEST,Blandiver

We marked the occasion with the live disk of the 'Experience' edition in the car whilst driving through the snowy East Anglian countryside for a sniff around Bury St Edmonds. All very chill & beautiful.

Looking back though, even as a 11-year-old I recognised DSOTM as a departure from the Pink Floyd I loved very dearly. Gone were the softly experimental folky pastoral / cosmic psychedelics and in their stead, a harsher, tighter more commercial sound that even now I find hard to connect with what went before (in my case Meddle & Obscured by Clouds; whilst my mates were raving about DSOTM I was listening to Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Saucerful of Secrets on the Nice Pair double set on which my ever censorious mother had given the naked ladies felt-tipped bras). Of course for many Pink Floyd begin with DSOTM, just as Kraftwerk begin with Autobahn (which is 40 next year! In 73 it was the pastoral folky textures of Ralf Und Florian, comparable to Pink Floyd of Ummagumma & Live at Pompeii). I guess it's just the unreconstructed folky in me that loves digging around in the pre-history and archaeology of a music which, in Pink Floyd's case, was at its most unique when it was running wild in the wilderness and Roger Water's came up with stuff like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH0FUJ7PKzM

Today, in Pink Floyd pilgrimage, we might go to Mildenhall; at any rate, there is a green man carving in the church there I'd like to see.


25 Mar 13 - 04:08 AM (#3494496)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: GUEST,Musket sans cookie

Right.   That age and heritage makes it folk music.

Gonna stick my finger in my ear and treat our local club to Brain Damage tonight...


25 Mar 13 - 04:41 AM (#3494503)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: SteveMansfield

And if the band you're in
Start playing different tunes ....

Happy birthday DSOTM


25 Mar 13 - 02:03 PM (#3494722)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: Musket

That was in my mind Steve...

How many times when I was in a Ceilidh band did that line drift across the stage to me....


25 Mar 13 - 02:27 PM (#3494732)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: RWJ

Dark Side introduced me to them but it allowed me the chance to appreciate their early material. Dark Side was a part of their progresion.


25 Mar 13 - 06:12 PM (#3494814)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: GUEST,Blandiver

The Mildenhall Green Man


26 Mar 13 - 11:51 AM (#3495093)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: Rob Naylor

Blandiver: I've performed "Grantchester Meadows" at many folk sessions and singarounds now, and, except for a few unreconstructed pre-DSOTM Floydies, the audience is usually very surprised at its provenence!


26 Mar 13 - 01:53 PM (#3495137)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: GUEST,Blandiver

Nice one, Rob. I used to hear it occasionally around the clubs in the 70s / 80s (Mudcat's own Raymond Greenoaken used to do a nice version) but not so very recently. A revival is definitely overdue - maybe I ought to have a word in the collective lug-hole of Sproatly Smith??

So, Grantchester Meadows and Let There Be More Light notwithstanding, are there any other Roger Waters / Pink Floyd songs that refer specifically to lore, landscape & locale of their native Cambridgeshire? On topic is King's College Chapel - Roger Waters is on record as saying the lawn to the rear inspired the line the lunatic is on the grass...


26 Mar 13 - 03:10 PM (#3495166)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: SteveMansfield

Fat Old Sun on Atom Heart Mother (the one with the bemused-looking cow on the cover) is, IIRC, another song about lazing about in Grantchester Meadows.


26 Mar 13 - 04:51 PM (#3495209)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: GUEST,Blandiver

And if you hear as the warm night falls
The silver sound from a time so strange,
Sing to me, sing to me...


The long live version, BBC 1971...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttPNilF3v5A


27 Mar 13 - 07:28 AM (#3495404)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: G-Force

They were never the same without Syd Barrett. More successful maybe, more commercial probably.


27 Mar 13 - 10:52 AM (#3495490)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: SteveMansfield

They were never the same without Syd Barrett. More successful maybe, more commercial probably.

Well you're getting into an unknowable alternate history there. They would certainly have developed very differently if a well Syd had remained part of the band, and quite possible David Gilmour would then never have joined in 1968. In which case you lose the distinctive Gilmour guitar sound which is one of the foundation pillars of 'The Pink Floyd Sound'.

Whether we would now be celebrating, or even remembering, the 40th anniversary of whatever (probably totally unlike DSOTM) album a Floyd-with-Syd had made in 1973 ... who knows?


27 Mar 13 - 12:26 PM (#3495528)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: cooperman

I think some of Syd's songs were quite commercial. They are what got Pink Floyd into the charts in the early days. Based on that success the record company gave the band free time in the studio to experiment.
The music then became less commercial, album based and better for it. I do think Syd was an amazing talent though, sadly lost to drugs like so many.


28 Mar 13 - 09:28 AM (#3495929)
Subject: RE: Pink Floyd 'Dark Side of the Moon' is 40
From: SteveMansfield

From The Guardian website today:

Sir Tom Stoppard has written a play for BBC Radio 2 to mark the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon featuring Bill Nighy and Rufus Sewell.

Broadcast date is sometime over the August bank holiday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/mar/28/bbc-radio-4-pink-floyd-tom-stoppard